Copyright 1985 by the American Psychological Association, Inc.

0096-3445/85/S00.7S

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

1985, Vol. 114, No. 2, 193-197

Levels Indeed! A Response to Broadbent

David E. Rumelhart and James L. McClelland
Institute for Cognitive Science, University of California, La Jolla

Although Broadbent concedes that we are probably correct in supposing that

memory representations are distributed, he argues that psychological evidence is
irrelevant to our argument because our point is relevant only at what Marr (1982)
has called the implementation^ level of description and that psychological theory
is only properly concerned with what Marr calls the computational level. We
believe that Broadbent is wrong on both counts. First, our model is stated at a
third level between the other two, Marr's representational and algorithmic level.
Second, we believe that psychology is properly concerned with all three of these
levels and that the information processing approach to psychology has been
primarily concerned with the same level that we are, namely, the algorithmic
level. Thus, our model is a competitor of the logogen model and other models of
human information processing. We discuss these and other aspects of the question
of levels, concluding that distributed models may ultimately provide more
compelling accounts of a number of aspects of cognitive processes than other,
competing algorithmic accounts.
Broadbent (1985) has generously conceded that
memory is probably represented in a distributed
fashion. However, he has argued that psychological
evidence is irrelevant to our argument because the
distributed assumption is only meaningful at the
implementation (physiological) level and that the
proper psychological level is the computational
level.
Broadbent has raised an extremely important
issue, one that has not generally received explicit
attention in the psychological literature, and we
applaud his attempt to bring it into focus. However,
the issue is very complex and deserves very close
scrutiny. Indeed, more levels must be distinguished
than Broadbent acknowledges, and there are many
more constraints among levels than he supposes.
We begin by pointing out that Broadbent has
ignored a third level of theoretical description, the
algorithmic level, which is a primary level at which
psychological theories are stated. We then suggest
that his analysis of our arguments fails to establish
his claim that our model and traditional models
are not competitors at the same level. We then
describe other senses of levels, including one in
which higher level accounts can be said to be
convenient approximations to lower level accounts.
This sense comes closest to capturing our view of
the relation between our distributed model and
Request for reprints should be sent to David E.
Rumelhart, Institute for Cognitive Science C-015, University of CaliforniaSan Diego, La Jolla, California
92093.

traditional information processing models of

memory.
Marr's Notion of Levels
Broadbent begins his argument by appealing to
the analysis of levels proposed by David Marr
(1982). Although we are not sure that we agree
entirely with Marr's analysis, it is thoughtful and
can serve as a starting point for seeng where
Broadbent's analysis went astray. Whereas Broadbent acknowledges only two levels of theory, the
computational and the implementational, Marr
actually proposes three, the computational, the
algorithmic, and the implementational levels. Table
1 shows Marr's three levels. We believe that our
proposal is stated primarily at the algorithmic
level and is primarily aimed at specifying the
representation of information and the processes
or procedures involved in storing and retrieving
information. Furthermore, we agree with Marr's
assertions that "each of these levels of description
will have their place" and that they are "logically
and causally related." Thus, no particular level of
description is independent of the others. There is
thus an implicit computational theory in our
model as well as an appeal to certain implementational (physiological) considerations. We believe
this to be appropriate. It is clear that different
algorithms are more naturally implemented on
different types of hardware, and therefore information about the implementation can inform our
hypotheses at the algorithmic level.
Broadbent's failure to consider the algorithmic

193

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DAVID E. RUMELHART AND JAMES L. McCLELLAND

Table 1
The Three Levels at Which any Machine
Carrying Out Information Processing Tasks Must
be Understood (Man, 1982)
Computational
theory

Representation
and algorithm

Hardware
implementation

What is the
goal of the
computation,
why is it
appropriate,
and what is
the logic of
the strategy
by which it
can be
carried out?

How can this

computational
theory be
implemented?
In particular,
what is the
representation
for the input
and output,
and what is
the algorithm
for the
transformation

How can the

representation
and algorithm
be realized
physically?

Note. From Vision by D. Marr. W. H. Freeman and Company 1982. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

level is crucial, we believe, because this is the very

level at which information processing models (including Morton's, 1969, logogen model) have been
stated. Computational models, according to Marr,
are focused on a formal analysis of the problem
the system is solvingnot the methods by which
it is solved. Thus, in linguistics, Marr suggests that
Chomsky's (1965) view of a competence model
for syntax maps most closely onto a computational
level theory, whereas a psycholinguistic theory is
more of a performance theory concerned with how
grammatical structure might actually be computed.
Such a theory is concerned with the algorithmic
level of description. It is the algorithmic level at
which we are concerned with such issues as efficiency, degradation of performance under noise or
other adverse conditions, whether a particular
problem is hard or difficult, which problems are
solved quickly, which take a long time to solve,
how information is represented, and so on. These
are all questions to which psychological inquiry is
directed and to which psychological data is relevant.
Indeed, it would appear that this is the level to
which psychological data primarily speaks. At the
computational level, it does not matter whether
the theory is stated as a program for a Turing
machine, as a set of axioms, or as a set of rewrite
rules. It does not matter how long the computation
takes, or how performance of the computation is
affected by performance factors such as memory
load, problem complexity, and so on. It does not
matter how the information is represented, as long
as the representation is rich enough, in principle,
to support computation of the required function.

The question is simply what function is being

computed, not how is it being computed.
Marr recommends that a good strategy in the
development of theory is to begin with a careful
analysis of the goal of a particular computation
and a formal analysis of the problem that the
system is trying to solve. He believes that this topdown approach will suggest plausible algorithms
more effectively than a more bottom-up approach.
Thus, the computational level is given some priority. However, Marr certainly does not propose that
a theory at the computational level of description
is an adequate psychological theory.
As psychologists, we are committed to an elucidation of the algorithmic level. We have no
quarrel with Marr's top-down approach as a strategy leading to the discovery of cognitive algorithms,
though we have proceeded in a different way. We
emphasize the view that the various levels of
description are interrelated. Clearly, the algorithms
must, at least roughly, compute the function specified at the computational level. Equally, the algorithms must be computable in amounts of time
commensurate with human performance, using
the kind and amount of hardware that humans
may reasonably be assumed to possess. For example, any algorithm that would require more
specific events to be stored separately than there
are synapses in the brain should be given a lower
plausibility rating than those that require much
less storage. Similarly, in the time domain, those
algorithms that would require more than one
serial step every millisecond or so would seem
poor candidates for implementation in the brain
(Feldman & Ballard, 1982).
To summarize, Broadbent's claim that our model
addresses a fundamentally different level of description than other psychological models is based
on a failure to acknowledge the primary level of
description to which much psychological theorizing
is directed. At this level, our model should be
considered as a competitor of other psychological
models as a means of explaining psychological
data.
Different Models or Different Levels?
But Broadbent offers more specific arguments
aimed at establishing that distributed models are
not competitors of psychological models. First, he
suggests that both distributed models and local
models are computationally equivalent, in that
distributed systems are not capable of any computation that cannot also be performed in a system
of localized storage. But this form of computational
equivalence is too weak, if we are interested in
specifying the representations and procedures used.
Different sorting algorithms may be computation-

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RESPONSE TO BROADBENT

ally equivalent in just Broadbent's sense but may

differ in whether the sorting time increases exponentially or merely log linearly with list length.
Casual appeals to Turing's thesis may be sufficient
to establish equivalence at the computational level,
but they are generally of little use to us in psychology, precisely because we are concerned with
stronger forms of equivalence of our models to
psychological processes.
Broadbent then discusses whether our model
could possibly offer alternatives to localist accounts
of memory such as logogen models and prototypeexemplar theories of concept learning. After pointing out the insights that logogen theory captures
insights that we, of course, appreciate and have
incorporated into our thinking (McClelland &
Rumelhart, 1981; Rumelhart, 1977, Rumelhart &
McClelland, 1981, 1982)he goes on to point out
that the proliferation of logogens that was occasioned by modality and even format specific repetition effects may not be necessary after all. One
can argue that the effects of a prior stimulus
pattern are not localized in the logogen itself but
are distributed throughout the pathway over which
the stimulus is being processed. We cannot understand why he thinks we would find this observation
to be devastating to our argument. Our argument
was based on an extension of the existing findings
to the conclusion that virtually any alteration of a
stimulus or the conditions of its presentation (differing context, etc.) that altered the pattern of
activation produced internally by the stimulus (we
should have stressed, in any of the several modules
in which the item would give rise to a pattern of
activation) would influence repetition effects. We
then showed that a distributed model would automatically capture this, without encountering the
need to proliferate logogens for each individual
variation of presentation conditions.
All of this is not to say that we believe that it
will be easy to distinguish distributed and localist
models empirically; especially if, as in Broadbent's
localist account, the localist model includes separate
representations of both exemplars and prototypes.
Actually, as we thought we made clear, there are
localist models that do not require local representations of prototypes to account for Whittlesea's
data (Hintzman, 1983; Whittlesea, 1983). But to
say that two models make the same predictions
for a given set of data is not to say that one should
be seen as an implementation of the other. The
models may simply be alternative constellations of
assumptions about representation and process that
happen to make identical or approximately equivalent predictions over some of the cases to which
they can be applied.
In summary, equivalence at the computational
level, the existence of ways to avoid proliferation

of logogens within logogen theory, and the possibility that local models can under some conditions
account for the same data as distributed models
does not prove the case that distributed models
are implementations of other cognitive models.
Other Notions of Levels
Yet we do believe that Broadbent is partly right
when he says that our distributed model (and the
class of models we have come to call parallel
distributed processing models) are at a different
level than models such as the logogen model, or
prototype theories, or schema theory. The reason
is that there is more twixt the computational and
the implementational than is dreamt of, even in
Marr's philosophy. Many of our colleagues have
challenged our approach with a rather different
conception of levels borrowed from the notion of
levels of programming languages. It might be
argued that Morton's logogen model is a statement
in a higher level language analogous, let us say, to
the Pascal programming language and that our
distributed model is a statement in a lower level
language that is, let us say, analogous to the
assembly code into which the Pascal program can
be compiled. Both Pascal and assembler, of course,
are considerably above the hardware level, though
the latter may in some sense be closer to the
hardware, and more machine dependent than the
other.
From this point of view one might ask why we
are mucking around trying to specify our algorithms at the level of assembly code when we
could state them more succinctly in a high level
language such as Pascal. We believe that most
people who raise the levels issue with regard to
our models have a relation something like this in
mind. Indeed, we suspect that this notion of levels
may be rather closer to Broadbent's own than the
notion of levels one finds in Marr. Like Broadbent,
people who adopt this notion have no objection
to our models. They only believe that psychological
models are more simply and easily stated in an
equivalent higher level languageso why bother?
We believe that the programming language analogy is very misleading. The relation between a
Pascal program and its assembly code counterpart
is very special indeed. Pascal and assembly language
necessarily map exactly onto one another only
when the program was written in Pascal and the
assembly code was compiled from the Pascal version. Had the original programming taken place
in assembler, there is no guarantee that such a
relation would exist. Indeed, Pascal code will, in
general, compile into only a small fraction of the
possible assembly code programs that could be
written. Because there is presumably no compiler

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DAVID E. RUMELHART AND JAMES L. McCLELLAND

to enforce the identity of our higher and lower

level descriptions in science, there is no reason to
suppose that there is a higher level description
exactly equivalent to any particular lower level
description. We may be able to capture the actual
code approximately in a higher level language
and it may often be useful to do sobut this does
not mean that the higher level language is an
adequate characterization,
There is still another notion of levels that illustrates our view. This is the notion of levels implicit
in the distinction between Newtonian mechanics
on the one hand and quantum field theory on the
other.1 It might be argued that a model like
Morton's logogen model is a macroscopic account,
analogous to Newtonian mechanics, whereas our
model is a more microscopic account analogous
to quantum field theory. Note, over much of their
range, these two theories make precisely the same
predictions about behavior of objects in the world.
Moreover, the Newtonian theory is often much
simpler to compute with, because it involves discussions of entire objects and ignores much of
their internal structure. However, in some situations
the Newtonian theory breaks down. In these situations, we must rely on the microstructural account
of quantum field theory. Through a thorough
understanding of the relation between the Newtonian mechanics and quantum field theory we can
understand that the macroscopic level of description
may be only an approximation to the more microscopic theory. Moreover, in physics, we understand
just when the macro theory will fail and when the
micro theory must be invoked. We understand the
macro theory as a useful formal tool, by virtue of
its relation to the micro theory. In this sense, the
objects of the macro theory can be viewed as
emerging from interactions of the particles described at the micro level.
In our article (and elsewhere) we have argued
that many of the constructs of macrolevel descriptions such as logogens, schemata, and prototypes
can be viewed as emerging out of interactions of
the microstructure of distributed models. (See
Rumelhart, Smolensky, McClelland, & Hinton, in
press, for a further discussion of the nature of this
emergence.) We view macrolevel theories as approximations to the underlying microstructure
that the distributed model presented in our article
attempts to capture. As approximations they are
often useful, but in some situations it will turn
out that a lower level description may bring deeper
insight. Note for example, that in the logogen
model one has to know how many logogens there
are. Are there three logogens for a word or just
one, or are there perhaps two and a half? In our
distributed formulation no such decision need be

made. Because the analog to a logogen is not

necessarily discrete but simply something that may
emerge from interactions among its distributed
parts, there is no problem with having the functional equivalent of half a logogen. Thus, although
we imagine that Morton's logogen model, schema
theory, prototype theory, and other macrolevel
theories make all more or less valid approximate
macrostructural descriptions, we believe that the
actual algorithms involved cannot be represented
precisely in any of those macrolevel theories. They
will require a distributed model of the general
kind described in our article.
Conclusion
An understanding of human memory requires
an analysis at many different levels. Marr's computational and implementation levels specify the
boundaries of psychological inquiry. In between,
at what Marr calls the algorithmic level, lies the
heart of our concerns. However, our examination
of analogies to computer science and physics suggests that we may well need to consider many
sublevels of analysis within the algorithmic level.
At a macroscopic level, a coarse-grained analysis
in which concepts, logogens, prototypes, schemata,
and so forth are treated as undecomposable wholes
may lead to insights; the discovery of the basic
level (Rosch, Mervis, Gray, Johnson, & BoyesBrian, 1976) would seem to be a case in point.
But when we look closely, both at the hardware
in which the algorithms are implemented and at
the fine structure of the behavior that these algorithms are designed to capture, we begin to see
reasons why it may be appropriate to formulate
models that come closer to describing the microstructure of cognition. The fact that models at this
level can account as easily as our model does for
many of the facts about the representation of
general and specific information makes us ask why
we should view constructs like logogens, prototypes,
and schemata as anything other than convenient
approximate descriptions of the underlying structure of memory and thought. Finally, it should be
said that the decision between our particular formulation and those implicit in the logogen model
and other competitors will not be made on the
basis of general considerations about what level of
theories psychologists should or should not be
interested in. Ultimately, the worth of our formulation will be determined by how useful it is at
explaining the facts of memory storage and retrieval
and to what degree it leads to new and fruitful
insights.
1

This analogy was suggested to us by Paul Smolensky.

RESPONSE TO BROADBENT

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Received December 17, 1984

Revision received December 17, 1984

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